B-Greek: The Biblical Greek Forum

Tell us about interesting projects involving biblical Greek. Collaborative projects involving biblical Greek may use this forum for their communication - please contact jonathan.robie@ibiblio.org if you want to use this forum for your project.

This is somewhat tangential to Biblical Greek, although the grist for the mill is Biblical Greek.

I've been doing multivariate analysis of textual variation among Greek New Testament witnesses. You can see the results here:

tfinney.net/Views/

As it says in the Note, "This is a draft in the process of composition. While the results are final, the discussion is not. "

The tetrahedral form of some of the maps based on comprehensive data from the INTF indicate to me that there were four major textual species early on. (Don't ask me to give an informed opinion of what early on means.) My guess is that the four correspond to four authority structures in the early church, what eventually became the patriarchates of Alexandria, Jerusalem, Antioch and Constantinople. (When versions are included, other clusters emerge. One is Western, including Old Latin, D, W. This cluster might be associated with the Latin-speaking church and the patriarchate of Rome. A study could be done of the Latins alone. I believe that a map composed of Latins will reflect the geographical roots of the witnesses.)

There is no reason why the same modes of analysis could not be applied to (Greek and other) witnesses of the Hebrew Bible, although there are far fewer than for the New Testament.